(Vienna) A canvas with a turbulent history by the most famous of Austrian painters, Gustav Klimt, will be shown to the public from Friday for the first time in almost sixty years in his country of origin.
Water Serpents IIwhich depicts naiads grappling with a red reptile, is a major work from Klimt’s golden period, on which he experimented with this work in gold leaf that has made him popular today.
But it remains unknown to the general public and for good reason: completed in 1907, this oil on canvas has only very rarely been exhibited.
Owned by a couple of Austrian collectors, it was confiscated by the Nazis after the annexation of the Alpine country by the Reich in 1938.
It will then be “bought by an illegitimate son of the artist”, director Gustav Ucicky, explains curator Markus Fellinger to AFP.
Shown for the last time in 1964 in Vienna, the canvas then fell into oblivion.
Until its surprise sale in 2013 by the widow of Ucicky, for 112 million dollars, to the president of AS Monaco, the Russian oligarch Dmitri Rybolovlev, who will sell it two years later.
Lent by HomeArt, collection founded in Hong Kong by Rosaline Wong, Water Serpents II is visible until May 29 at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, the institution which already houses an important collection of the works of Gustav Klimt.
It was while preparing an ambitious new exhibition on the artists who inspired the master (Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, Auguste Rodin, etc.) that the Belvedere, in cooperation with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, managed to locate the painting.
As Austria could not afford the six-figure insurance premium needed to bring him in, the artist’s specialist museum offered expertise and restoration in return.